How AI Is Rebuilding Trust in Home Renovations

Today, creating a home you love is more difficult than ever. We face an unprecedented housing shortage in the US. A lack of supply has driven home prices to new highs while record mortgage rates have exacerbated the affordability crisis. Most Americans cannot afford to buy new homes, and many are choosing to renovate the homes they have. The American Dream of buying a starter home and then upgrading as your family evolves is now out of reach for many. The starter home often becomes the forever home.

However, remodeling your home can be a fraught journey. Many homeowners don’t know how much various modifications should cost, or which materials to choose, or how to find professionals they can trust. Information is massively fragmented. The industry is made up of hundreds of thousands of mom-and-pop contractors, and most of them will give you different answers on pricing, timing, and scope. Every home is different, often with years of work that hasn’t been clearly documented. Surprises are common. Costs often climb. There is no single, reliable ground truth.

Until now, transparency and trust were fundamentally broken in home renovations. This is precisely where AI is having an impact today, by giving every homeowner transparent, trusted, personalized support. 

AI empowers homeowners and contractors to speak the same language. It creates a shared understanding of what’s possible, hard tradeoffs, and any potential surprises. And the results of that heightened trust are hugely impactful, driving growth in an industry facing powerful tailwinds, including aging housing stock and a nationwide housing shortage.

Lack of transparency underscores the entire renovation process

In the renovation industry, there are no big national players that consumers can rely on. If you go into a Starbucks, you know what to expect. If you hire a contractor, you have no idea what to expect, and those contractors differ state by state, city by city, even contractor to contractor on the same block.

There’s also a disconnect between homeowners and contractors. Contractors live deeply in the world of construction and renovation. Homeowners are often learning that on the go, but they are also afraid of being taken advantage of. So homeowners will say, “I totally understand the scope of work,” and contractors will say, “Okay, we’re on the same page.” The final understanding is often not the same. When surprises do come up, inevitably there is disagreement. Many projects end up in conflict, sometimes with homeowners and contractors parting ways, because they really struggle to get on the same page, communicate, and work through challenges together.

This dynamic highlights the growing importance of transparency in renovation and construction. Most homeowners engage with the process infrequently, while contractors operate in an environment shaped by complexity and margin pressure. As AI becomes more embedded in planning and communication workflows, it is beginning to reshape how projects are evaluated, coordinated, and executed. 

AI empowers homeowners to plan and hire with confidence

For individuals who are in the early stages of exploring what’s possible for their space, even understanding the realm of possibilities can be challenging. Information about renovations is fragmented and most people spend a lot of time Googling. They’re on Pinterest and Instagram, reading blogs, or asking friends for insight. The information volume is high, but there’s very little synthesis, and all of that information is generic, as what’s possible in your space is very different from what’s possible in another space.

Homeowners who have the means and resources can hire an architect or a designer to take them by the hand and walk them through this journey, but that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Most people can’t afford this added expense, especially for a smaller project like a bathroom. So they are stuck trying to piece together information and translate it into something useful.

What AI can do is offer that personalized support on demand. Let’s say you’re starting out, with a sense that you want to open up your kitchen because you want more light. What are the options? How do you get there? What are the trade-offs? How much might it cost? AI can help you do that in a personalized way, just like a design expert would.

Some platforms now allow homeowners to visualize their space, explore design and material options, and see how those choices affect projected costs in real time. It’s the equivalent of having an architect in your pocket at all times.

And when it comes to hiring a contractor, AI can help bridge asymmetries. A homeowner might be reviewing three proposals from contractors. They’re all different, with varying scopes and prices, and the homeowner doesn’t know how to compare them. AI can help homeowners deeply understand, compare, and ultimately empower them to make the right decisions.

Empowering contractors to build thriving businesses

AI also delivers substantial benefits to professionals. Contractors often don’t have huge office teams. It’s easy for them to get bogged down by paperwork and long back-and-forths with clients. AI can take a lot of the administrative work off their plates, empowering them to do what they do best, which is building physical spaces.

AI can give contractors access to a steady flow of high-quality projects. These are projects where the homeowner has a clear scope and budget and is ready to build. When the client has used AI to prepare and educate themselves, they are leagues ahead of someone who didn’t, meaning the contractor can win the job and get to work faster.

The future of the homeowner-contractor relationship is more personalization and more support

There was an initial version of marketplaces like Craigslist where the main currency was volume—aggregation of demand and supply in the same place so they could discover each other. Then there were Marketplaces 2.0 with platforms like Yelp, which offered information to consumers and suppliers to help them make informed decisions. Right now, we’re on the cusp of Marketplaces 3.0, and those marketplaces are agentic. Instead of just providing volume or information, they do real work for you, while putting you in control. 

For instance, if you have to schedule site surveys with a contractor, instead of going back and forth, the platform will do that for you. If a contractor comes back with a proposal that’s way above your budget, it’ll figure out your trade-offs, preferences, and constraints, and then go back to the contractor to negotiate for you. Imagine a world where instead of navigating all of this by yourself, you work with a small army of personalized agents who drive the outcomes you want.

Today, the main hurdle holding back many homeowners from creating spaces they love is the overwhelm of the process, because it is a daunting amount of work. Agentic marketplaces will take on a lot of that work directly, making renovations more accessible, transparent, and trusted.